Peggy and Goliath

THE heroine of ''The Giant'sHouse,'' a librarian named Peggy Cort, is an old maid. In the 1990's, I suppose, we'd have to call her ''matrimonially challenged''
-- a woman nobody wants. But in the course of the novel, this secret romantic's hard shell cracks open in the heat of a most peculiar passion.

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The story begins in a small Cape Cod town in 1950, when a 6-foot-2-inch 11-year-old boy walks up to the 25-year-old librarian's desk, looking for books about magic. James Carlson Sweatt, ''brilliant . . . handsome
and talented, but doomed to be mostly enormous,'' quickly enchants the misanthropic Miss Cort. By the time of his death nine years later, the young giant (now 8 feet 7 inches and 415 pounds) has transformed the heart of the
lonely spinster from a tabula rasa into a fully annotated book of love.

Elizabeth McCracken, the author of a collection of short stories, ''Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry'' (1993), and herself a former librarian, acknowledges that ''Librarian (like Stewardess,
Certified Public Accountant, Used Car Salesman) is one of those occupations that people assume attract a certain deformed personality.'' But throughout the novel, Peggy displays a dry and winning wit on the subject of her
orderly profession: ''In reference works, as in sin, omission is as bad as willful misbehavior''; librarians ''are paid all day to be generous, and no one recognizes our generosity''; ''Library
books were, I suddenly realized, promiscuous, ready to lie in the arms of anyone who asked.''

Though this sharp-tongued bibliophile shakes her finger at ''the thoughtless people who kept books too long and the hopeful people who returned them late but never paid the fines,'' Peggy is herself consumed
by equal measures of greed and hope. As the years pass, she becomes slavishly indispensable to the ever-growing James: as servant, teacher, nurse, companion -- and finally, in an odd and poignant way, as lover to the impotent and dying
young colossus.

Depending on your penchant for self-abnegating, unreasoning, doomed-from-the-get-go romantic yearnings, Peggy Cort's obsession with James Sweatt can be viewed as either swoonily satisfying or pathologically perverse. Peggy
never tires of celebrating her desolation: ''I am a fundamentally sad person, a fundamentally unlovable person, a person who spends her life longing for a number of things she cannot bring herself to name or define.''
''Other people's happiness,'' she snaps, ''is always a fascinating bore. It sucks the oxygen out of the room; you're left gasping, greedy, amazed by a deficit in yourself you hadn't ever
noticed.''

But when it comes to oxygen sucking, nobody outdoes Peggy Cort herself. In this woman's airless emotional universe, other human beings function largely as clever figurative conceits. We're left wondering if even James,
with his grotesquely decaying feet so lovingly tended (''I knew his feet best. . . . They were my inheritance, my territory'') and his unseen, underdeveloped sexual organs, isn't finally just a king-size metaphor
for our heroine's unusual ruminations on the physical nature of love.

Ms. McCracken unpacks her metaphors with the intensity of a poet. Of James's body after death, Peggy muses: ''Somebody did want his bones: me. Not just bones, or the quilted muscles that wrapped them, or the resistant
but assailable cartilage in his ears. I wanted to ladle together my hands and dip them in him and cast from my netted fingers a net of blood onto the floor to read.'' She then goes on in a similar vein about his urine and
his feces (''I wanted everything'').

Having made this rather startling profession, Peggy does, to her credit, acknowledge that ''by now you think I sound desperate and sick.'' The prose in ''The Giant's House'' is often
exquisite. But what are we to make of its heroine's psyche? Could it be, as Peggy speculates, ''that I knew all along that he'd die . . . and that's why I'd loved him?'' That ''we unhappy
. . . want only to assure ourselves and the world that our unhappiness is justified and real''? After spending many pages in Peggy Cort's company, I'd answer a resounding ''Yes!'' But Elizabeth
McCracken and her heroine don't see it that way at all.

IN Jane Austen's version of this plot, Peggy Cort would come to realize that her love for James Sweatt was more sensibility than sense. But Ms. McCracken opts instead for a melodramatic finale that would make a Bronte sister
blush. After James dies, Peggy has a single night of sex with his long-lost father and bears a child (claiming it as the offspring of the giant himself). She triumphantly declares herself a bride in ''the first posthumous
marriage in history.''

And so our heroine, a princess in a fractured fairy tale, lives happily unhappily ever after: ''Sometimes you have to marry your tower, your tiny room. You must take great interest in everything, a spinning wheel, a
perfect single bed, the sound of someone breathing on the other side of the door. . . . My love for James was the dark room I moved into that day.'' It seems that this giant's house isn't big enough for anyone but
a solitary librarian.